Exciting New Work by Irish Artist Chara Nagle

Irish Artist, Chára Nagle returns with a new body of work in March 2018.

The Haystacks exhibition will be hosted by Merrion Capital, at Heritage House, 23 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, launching March 7th, and running March 8th until March 21st, 2018. The exhibition will be open to the public from 10.00am to 5.00pm, Monday through Friday.

This twelve-piece series, created using tempera grassa on large board, captures the essence of the Irish country landscape at harvest time, inspired by the Kildare farm of her mother’s youth.

Chára Nagle is best known for her widely acclaimed Moments 1 collection - flamboyant, sensuous figurative paintings, that captured the excesses of the Celtic Tiger.

She later worked as Artist in Residence at The Curragh, where her dynamic equestrian and horse-racing scenes were in huge demand and now sit in public and private collections across the world

Haystacks captures the raw, scorched beauty of lands that have been stripped of their cover. Large, tightly wound hay bales are scattered across the landscape, their cylindrical form modern and industrial, the natural content barely contained, bursting from their binds. The ground is spiked and bruised. Each painting captures a different mood, with low horizon lines and animated cloudscapes, shafts of golden light and inky night time skies reflecting the mercurial nature of the Irish weather.

Known for her use of bright acrylic colours in her figurative works, Haystacks required a very different medium. Chára began researching traditional painting methods and following a visit to the Louvre, the Old Masters works in tempera provoked an interest. Mineral pigments from Magasin Sennelier in Paris were sourced, derived from natural materials. Chára mixes her paints daily, adding organic eggs, distilled water, Stand oil and Damar varnish to each pigment to create tempera grassa. The purity of this paint reflects the clarity of the subject and the finished effect is transcending and durable. Chára describes using these materials as akin to “painting the source, with the source”.

Haystacks are of course a subject which many artists have approached, from Monet’s 1890’s Haystack series to Paul Henry’s use of haystacks as one of many elements in the narrative of his stunning Achill scenes. Chára spent much time considering and observing how these great artists and many others tackled the material, to find her own response to the subject.

About Chara

Originally from Cork, she graduated from NCAD in the mid-nineties and after stints in advertising in London and New York, she returned to Ireland to set up CN Design, one of Ireland’s most successful creative agencies, working on experiential campaigns for premium brands including Jameson, BMW, Guinness and Coca Cola. She stepped away from the corporate design world in the early noughties to focus on her own work, which she describes as “Heightened realism in style, larger than life.”